Mark Parker

SOURCE: "The Name of the Rose' as a Postmodern Novel," in Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's 'The Name of Rose, ' edited by M. Thomas Inge, University Press of Mississippi, 1988, pp. 48-61.

In the following essay, Parker examines the postmodernist tendencies of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in light of Eco's own literary criticism.

We live in a decade of "post's": poststructuralism, postmodernism, and the teasingly paradoxical postcontemporary. Almost no one, however, seems happy with the term postmodern. It is most often used, as one critic puts it, "pis aller," as if it were a tool designed obsolete or a category always empty.1 In his Postscript to "The Name of the Rose, " Eco slips by its insufficiencies with characteristic good humor, noting its ever-widening range and variety of application, and ultimately presenting it as "an ideal category—or better still, a Kunstwollen...